


Kismet Fish

by paradoxCase



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Quadrant Confusion, Troll Romance Hate/Love Tesseract
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-18
Updated: 2012-06-03
Packaged: 2017-11-03 20:37:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradoxCase/pseuds/paradoxCase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dave finds quadrants confusing, Karkat only thinks he knows what he's doing, and Terezi is no one's auspistice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dave: Be the city planner.

**Author's Note:**

> For [this kinkmeme prompt](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/15949.html?thread=33772621). One anon suggested Terezi♥Karkat♦Gamzee♠Terezi. I suggested Dave♦Terezi♥Karkat♠Dave. Then I realized that I could have my shippingcake and everyone else's too! If you find these shenanigans confusing, [here](http://i43.tinypic.com/144b5fb.gif) is a helpful shipping chart created by a lovely anon who may or may not be Karkat with a broken capslock key.
> 
> (Special note for fellow pedants: I know that technically it is not a "meteor" until it enters the atmosphere and becomes an instrument of flaming apocalypse, but _everyone_ in the canon refers to it as one, so it will be a "meteor" here for the sake of maintaining POV integrity.)

**> Dave: Be the city planner.**

You are the best goddamn city planner, it is you. The Can Town skyline looks pretty damn respectable from here, with high-density residential areas, a business district, and a happening downtown where a guy could pick up a sweet little jar of spiced peaches at any one of a number of bars constructed out of cans of only the highest quality beer. Terezi has the government offices covered, and while her architectural style is pretty fucking bizarre, you have to admit that her creations all have a definite sense of _gravitas_. (Is that a word? It better be a goddamned word, because everything about the way Terezi does things makes you think of snappy pencilnecks with their fancy higher educations strifing with each other and getting their fucking Latin on, and damn if shit doesn't sound more real when you know how to say it in a foreign language.) Anyway, there's a definite stylistic divide between the things you designed and the things she did, like an invisible line that separates the part of the city where the cops actually arrest people for jaywalking from the parts where you could wake up in a bathtub full of ice if you're not careful. Or in this case, maybe bags of frozen peas.

The Mayor's been a pretty good sport, letting Terezi design his mayoral seat, but he made her tone it down a bit because apparently a mayor has to be down to earth and one with the people, so he can listen to their peasantly woes and shit. You are one hundred percent behind that sentiment, cool dudes like the Mayor don't have anything to do with the grandiose legislative buildings Terezi turns out, and he's definitely not arresting anyone for jaywalking. What you're less down with is that every time you put in another high-rise he requisitions more unclaimed land for his vast green checkerboard of farmland and fields, because (he says) there's no way you're going to feed all those people otherwise. You tried pointing out all the grocery stores you built, and that food does in fact in grow on trees, especially when you're living in an apartment building made out of soup cans, come on man, but he just shakes his head and goes off to use up all of your green chalk for the third time in as many days, man, he must be _eating_ it or something. He's a cool dude, but he's a fucking weirdo, too. You guess that makes six of them; six weirdos and one awesome king of cool Dave Strider, on a meteor headed for who the fuck knows where. Could be a sitcom.

But you can't plan the city right now, because you're not currently building Can Town, just taking a moment to admire its brilliance. The cranes and cement-mixers and jackhammers and guys in bright orange jackets and whatever other shit you need to build a city are all gone back into their hidey-holes, and the citizens would be praising their awesome and sensitive mayor for finally turning off the goddamn constant roaring racket of urban expansion, except that he's not here either. You were building it earlier, but then the green chalk evaporated again and now it's just you and Terezi, propped up against the wall, surveying the domain of your joint awesomeness. Well, she's up against the wall, and maybe you're actually lying down with your head in her lap, but if any of the other jokers on this rock have a problem with that they can just suck it, and they're not here anyway. A year ago you'd have said it was just for the irony, and you'd probably still say that if someone else came in here right now, but fuck it, this thing with Terezi is the most unironically awesome thing ever, and anyone who can't tell irony from a hole in the wall doesn't even need to know that.

She always knows, though. She gets irony like Egbert never did, and she can always tell when something is actually ironic, and when you're just saying it is to fuck with people. You cannot fuck with Terezi, she is un-fuckable-with, she is just that good at rocking the Blind Seer shit. And speaking of, in spite of all her deadly seriousness, her _gravitas_ , her unfuckableness, her sharp and pointy dangerousness, she is actually pretty chill. Any other blind kid, you put them down in a sadistic as fuck video game that gives them the title _Seer_ , like "ha ha, you schmuck, let's see you try to be a goddamn Seer when you can't even fucking _see_ , lololol", and they'd probably flip their shit faster than Vantas, which has got to put them in line for the motherfucking shit-flipping Olympics. But Terezi has got this the fuck _down_ ; maybe she can't see your face, but she can smell enough stuff that it doesn't even matter, and she can see right into the depths of your fucking soul. And even though she knows everything there is to know about you, she still thinks you are the fucking shit, and if that isn't deserving of some unironic love, you don't know what is.

"What are you thinking about, coolkid?" she asks, because she's got to hide her secret identity as an all-knowing fucking superhero at least some of the time.

"Just how uncomfortable your bony-ass legs are," you tell her. "I don't know why you even had to use your cane to stab things in your session when you could have just stuck your damn knees into them for the same effect." It's a lie, but she knows it; she is pretty bony, but you got over that ages ago. Rose would just get exasperated with you for not being serious, but Terezi can appreciate your words for their own sake, and fuck the meaning or lack thereof; the banter is the backbeat of your existence, and using language solely for the pedestrian task of communication is for lesser beings who don't already know each other inside and out.

She cackles. "I know you love every one of my sharp corners, Dave! I'll have you know that I have been seducing coolkids with jabs of my exquisitely pointed elbows since before your universe existed. Nine out of ten incredibly cool dudes only wish they could experience my accute angles in person!"

"Nine out of ten incredibly cool dudes are not even on this meteor," you point out, "and the only dude I see approaching your spiny embrace is pretty much the polar opposite of cool." For the past weeks she's been talking pretty much non-stop about him. Apparently, after just one awesome bout of collaborative shitty penis art followed by a smackdown involving entirely too much cape molestation, he actually figured out that if he wanted to have some kind of real, in-person relationship with Terezi he was going to have to fucking, get this, _talk_ to Terezi, like in person and everything. Not that you mind; she's clearly not abandoning you for him, because of this wacky polyamory shit trolls have going on, so whatever, and hearing second-hand about his continuous social fuckups, his inability to communicate with words while simultaneously lacking any kind of poker face, and his constant need to be a high-strung douchenozzle is the best way to enjoy the utter hilarity that is Karkat Vantas without having to experience the sympathetic rising blood pressure and uncomfortably personal feelings of rage that come from actually being in his presence.

"He is not _that_ bad," she objects. "I think he's finally starting to get it now! Perhaps Gamzee has degrumpified him a bit, but while he'll certainly never achieve Strider-levels of cool, he has definitely made progress. I have not heard him whine about something he cannot do anything about in several days now, and yesterday he even did something that might even be construed as romantic." She grins down at you, flashing razor-sharp teeth from ear to ear. "Are you ready to hear about it and pass your extremely estimable judgement?"

"Nah." For some reason, talking shit about Vantas isn't actually a thing you want to do anymore. You probably owe it to her, since she always listens to you bitch about how John isn't here and no one on this hunk of space debris really comes close to approximating your best fucking friend (no offense meant to present company, and apparently none taken), but you really can't get behind it right now. Somehow the idea of that shouty asshole doing anything sweet and romantic is harshing your cool like it's never been harshed before, just turning your stomach in ways that aren't hilarious at all, and you don't even know why. You sit up and reach for a pile of discarded cans. "Let's add some more wings to your crazy-ass courthouse instead."

She doesn't move to help you. "We were doing that before! Right now I'd rather just talk. What's gotten into you all of a sudden?" You can feel the worry in her voice like a sour note, a beat hit just a moment too late. "You can always talk to me too, you know."

Shit. When she starts telling you things you already know, it means she's about to pull out her big guns and try to pry your issues out from under your protective layers. It's almost always worth it, but suddenly it's not something you're ok with anymore. You feel weirdly claustrophobic, even though you're in a big open room and it's only the two of you here.

"I know. I think I just need to clear my head a bit, is all. You mind if I go take a walk for a while? We can talk later, I promise." You reach down for her hand and give her your best everything-is-cool smile. She doesn't look convinced, but of course she wouldn't be.

"I'll hold you to that." She points her glasses up at yours, and that still has the same effect even when you know she doesn't use her eyes to see. "You take care of yourself, coolkid."

You nod and head off, leaving Can Town, and Terezi, and thoughts of nubby-horned assholes behind you.


	2. Dave: Take a walk.

**> Dave: Take a walk.**

Alright, so this isn't really helping. This place has way too many empty rooms full of creepy alien detritus to possibly be good for anyone's peace of mind, and now that you're thinking about it, you can't help remembering that Karkat's creepy murder-happy juggalo cuddle-boyfriend or whatever is skulking around here somewhere, and Kanaya's maybe hunting him down with a fucking chainsaw. Forget sitcoms, that is straight-up slasher movie shit right there, and everyone knows what happens to blonds in slasher movies. Granted, usually they're chicks, but the psycho with the chainsaw is usually a dude, too, so you figure there's some gender-bend leeway here. You slip your favorite half-sword out of your strife specibus. Not that you couldn't probably deal with either of those creeps without resorting to violence, but it never hurts to be prepared.

Right on cue, there's the telltale sound of a door opening behind you, and you spin around, sword gripped tightly and body tensed. Shit, it's just Vantas. You're not sure whether you're relieved, or just annoyed. 

He attempts a look of nonchalant exasperation, but he's obviously feeling just as creeped out by this place as you are. "Just who are _you_ planning to skewer today, Strider? There are only six people here, and fully half of us haven't actually murdered anyone yet. It'd be really fucking great if we could maintain that high score for at least another quarter sweep."

"You mean seven." You attempt to relax a bit, but you don't put your sword back. He's as tightly-wound as ever, and his intensity must be catching, or something.

"What?"

"There are seven of us here, dude. You always forget the Mayor, and if there's one person in this place who's not going to go ax-crazy, it's him. You think about that the next time you're making out with your goddamn crazy fucking clown creeper."

Oh yeah, that's pissed him off. Pop goes the weasel. You tense your sword hand again and wait for the fireworks to go off.

"Gamzee is only a fucking danger to himself!" Karkat's fists are balled and his jaw is set. "And you're one to talk about _my_ moirallegiance - you do remember that Terezi killed _you_ , don't you?"

You do, actually, imagine that. First thing you'd ever asked of her, after you actually met in person and became friends and sort of more than friends: _promise me no one else is going to die just so you can prove some stupid point, ok?_ She'd gotten this sick guilty look on her face remembering dead Dave, and you know you saw bizarrely colored tears in her eyes when she promised, which was all the guarantee you'll ever need. Terezi doesn't cry if she can help it. But this shit is none of his fucking business, no matter how much she likes him right now.

"Your shit is not even remotely comparable to my shit," you tell him. "We're not even talking like apples and oranges here, this is like comparing a haunted house to the Empire fucking State Building. You can have your fucked-up scary romance, but it is nothing like anything I will ever have going on. I don't care what kind of funny troll words you want to slap on my business, it sure as hell doesn't give you the right to butt in."

Somehow during all of that he's been advancing and you've been giving ground, and now you're facing each other across the middle of this mostly-empty room, and he's got a sickle in his hand. Is it fucking strife time then? Bring it on, you are more than ready for him. If he can manage to avoid tying himself up in your cape this time, that is.

You know your mind's fully shifted gears when you find that you're circling each other, coiling this tension spring tighter and tighter. He's an open book as always, but he doesn't seem any more nervous than you are, just full of determination coupled with anger. He's shorter than you, but only just, and he looks better built. Swords should require more upper body strength than his sickles, but all of yours are half as long as they should be, and doesn't he double-weild sometimes? You can't remember. He better not being trying to pull some kind of I Am Not Left-Handed bullshit here, but if he does you're ready for it. Although, the idea of him managing anything nearly that suave is pretty laughable.

It's sort of a luxury for you, getting a chance to size up opponents like this. Bro was never so considerate - he'd pop out of nowhere and disappear back into nowhere again, often before you'd even had a chance to properly retaliate, not that there was ever any conclusion you could have drawn from him beyond _never even gonna touch that, man_. The monsters from the game were all exactly what they seemed like - big dumb mooks with no real strategy other than Zergrush. Even after Harley prototyped her radioactive helldog who turned out to be some kind of Elder God or something, they just kept doing the same damn shit, only with more gamma rays. You guess Jack Noir could have been interesting, but you weren't really in the mood by that point.

It occurs to you that you've never had a face-to-face fight with a real person before. That's a stupid thought, though, and you've got more important things to think about right now.

"Did I hear that right, bulgemunch?" says Karkat. "This from the self-proclaimed 'wordsmith' of 'ill beats' and 'sick fires', you find basic troll relationship terminology too much fucking trouble to bother with? You are clearly in way over your head here. Just because you don't want to think about how your quadrants work doesn't mean they don't fucking exist, and if you even took a minute to learn anything about this, you'd know that we _are_ kind of each other's business now. Conciliatory partners are supposed to be able stabilize the web, and if you fail at that you fail everyone."

"What," you ask, "is this the kind of thing they tell you in Troll Seventeen Magazine?"

"Fuck you, Strider," he says, and then goes off on another boring rant about romance. You tune out the meaning and just listen to the words - there's a rhythm to the way you're moving now, you can match  
the shuffle of your feet  
to the pattern of his speech  
to the ticking of the clock  
on a symbol slashed with red  
that never fucking stops  
like an echo in your head--

He lunges, precisely on the beat and therefore precisely when you expect him to, like the predictable dumbfuck he is. You are already moving, of course, flashstepping off to the side, and then you're facing each other again, circling in the same way. Second verse, same as the first. It's a goddamned _dance_. You could toy with him some more and let him blow off his steam this way, but more than anything else you really want to make him miss a step and break the beat, just give in to all of that fucking rage. It's odd, because you've never been one to pick fights, and you'd have given everything to have had a strife like this with Bro.

"You think you've got this all figured out, don't you?" You watch him carefully as you circle back around. "Even with a bunch of your friends dead, and the rest gradually going nuts." Lunge, dodge. Still on the beat, still in the dance. He's aiming for new places, trying to anticipate your movements, still too collected for the kind of fight you want today. "Nothing in your session went according to plan, did it?" It's subtle, but he skipped a beat, a footfall just a nanosecond too soon. "If you think you've got your clown so under control now, why couldn't you have worked that magic _before_ he went and killed everyone?"

Step. Stepstep. Stumble, lunge, and some kind of fucking artless flail, and it's too early, far too early in this cycle. You were waiting for it, but without the beat to guide you you're reacting instead of anticipating. He's got his sickle up in your personal space, but you manage to knock it away with your sword - his grip's gone to hell and he's not moving with purpose anymore. He goes for your wrists and hands in response, wrenching them out of harm's way with brute force and _twisting_. Your sword clatters to the floor beside you as he breaks your grip, and now he's pinned your arms up against the wall you didn't notice sneaking up on you. He _is_ stronger than you and maybe better at this wrestling thing, but you could probably get out of this if you just--

Suddenly he's kissing you, rough and forceful and a bit clumsy, like he's trying to disassemble your face with his lips and can't quite get the logistics to work out. Your previous train of thought stutters to a halt, but underneath all that strifing strategy and the cool facade, a small part of you just says _hell fucking yes_ and you give him back as good as you got. Better, even. You'll teach this fucker how to kiss someone up against a wall.

Wait. What the hell?

Yeah, part of you really wants this, apparently, but the rest of you is resurfacing after that brief hiccup in the procedings, and has _no idea_ what is going on here anymore. In over your head, he said before? You are in so far over your head that the pressure is capsizing your lungs, and you can practically feel nitrogen bubbles building up in your joints from the vast ocean of troll bullshit that is rushing in all around you.

His fangs dig into your lower lip, and the pain momentarily turns Strife Mode back on again. You're back to working out where to hurt him and how to remove his grip from your upper arms, and apparently you and he are still on the same page here, too. You twist an arm free from his and elbow him in the ribs; he grunts and lets go of your mouth while he grabs at your wrist again, probably hard enough to bruise. Then he is back to kissing you. There is definitely blood on your chin now. Your shades got knocked off at some point and you didn't even notice.

 _Is_ this still a fight? Are you still fighting to win? Is _he_? What even constitutes winning or losing if you both want this? Strifing has goals, and kissing has goals, and you're pretty sure _none_ of them go together. You want to stop and ask what the hell he is doing, what the hell _you_ are doing for that matter, but it seems to be too late for that now. Bro used to tell you that there was no situation you couldn't get yourself out of with superior fighting abilities, but Karkat's expecting you to fight and you are dancing to his rhythm now. It's your turn to break the beat.

You stop kissing him, and stop wrestling him, too, consciously relaxing all your muscles. He stops what he's doing immediately, lets go, backs up a step to look you in the eyes. His face has confusion and - is that _hurt_? - written all over it, but you don't have time to figure this out right now. He opens his mouth to say something, but you've already recovered your shades and your sword and you abscond the fuck out of there before any more weird shit can happen.


	3. Terezi: Examine evidence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay - this took forever to write for some reason.

**> Terezi: Examine evidence.**

Your moirail is upset, and it is all Karkat's fault!

Well, maybe not entirely his. Perhaps if your silly coolkid had been willing to jam with you earlier instead of running off to cause trouble this could have been avoided. Your life is full of silly boys right now! Fortunately you love them anyway, so you will help them fix this. You really don't know what they would do without you.

You are not in a pile. You tried to introduce Dave to the concept of a pile long ago, but he never really got it. The first time, it was just because he was too soft and squishy to enjoy it, and kept complaining about _all this shit that's sticking into my back, seriously what is even up with that, why would you lie down in a pile of this crap_. Then you made him a pile out of only your softest scalemates, but while he had to admit it was extremely comfortable, after a few minutes he got restless and self-conscious and couldn't sit still. Well, he told you that it was because he "couldn't maintain the irony level necessary to justify cuddling in a mountain of stuffed animals", but you knew what he meant.

So, instead of lying in a pile like a couple of sappy romcom heroes, you build Can Town! Of course, this isn't the only reason for building Can Town - Can Town serves many and varied purposes when it comes to the members of your little group - but it _is_ one of your favorites. It is really not that different from traditional piling anyway - it's just that instead of sitting in the random junk, you play with it. After only a week or so of this you had already become convinced that it was, in fact, a far more effective and enjoyable venue for moirallegiance. Karkat was predictably horrified to discover that you were using Can Town for this purpose, and told you that you could at least _attempt_ to maintain "normal troll relationships", but what Karkat doesn't understand is that there are no trolls like Dave and never have been, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

Dave is normally happy to build while he talks, and it seems to help him to have something to do with his hands. Now, however, he just sits there staring blankly at the grand spires of the central courtblock complex like he doesn't know what to make of them anymore. He's removed his shades, and his cherry-red eyes are now matched to sharp spots of blood on his lower lip. He shifts his gaze and rubs distractedly at the frames; apparently they got scuffed in the excitement, and he's probably reconstructing the damage as some kind of tactile metaphor for the new scuffs on his mask of coolness. Time for an intervention!

"Come on, Dave," you say. "Let's add that wing you wanted to build earlier. This sector is looking a bit lopsided! What do you think about decorations?"

"There are way too fucking many of them already," he says, finally putting down the damn shades and accepting the can you hold out to him. "I know you're going to add more no matter what I say, but can we at least go with tasteful colors this time?"

You have been taking the colorful labels off the cans as you go, cutting them into strips and fun patterns and sticking them on to the buildings in appropriate places. You don't know what he means by "tasteful colors" - all of the colors are tasteful, and tasty! Of course it only makes sense that the cans are tasty on the outside and the inside both. "Whatever you say, Dave," you tell him, because tasty is tasty.

He puts his can in place to begin the new wing. "How is this kismesis thing supposed to work, anyway? You just beat each other up all the time?"

It's technically the wrong question; if you only ask how things are _supposed_ to work, you end up like Karkat, and no one wants that. But Dave is still a blank slate in so many respects, and you have to build up expectations before you can tear them down and remodel them into something more useful, and this is as good a place to start as any. "No, silly," you tell him. "It is about _fighting_ , not about _hurting_. And that isn't all there is to it - is your human romance only about making out?" You ease another can out of its minty green wrapper and set it down next to Dave's.

"No," he admits. "At least, I don't think so." Well, fair enough, you have never had a kismesis either! You are both sitting here and talking about theoretical mental and cultural constructs that have no true basis in your actual experiences, but it's not like there is anyone left to tell you you are wrong. "So you just try to win the fight, then? Is there some funny troll rule about who gets to win or whatever?" A third can joins the construction site.

"You're not supposed to win." You move his last can to the other side of the cluster, peeling it out of its orange-rind label as you do. This courtblock needs alcoves for the legislacerators before you can start thinking about the audience seating area. "If you win, it means you are not well-matched! You provide a challenge for your kismesis, and they provide one for you. Otherwise there is no point."

He looks thoughtful, and considers the architectural modifications you made. You've found that his unshaded eyes can be incredibly expressive, and you savor these times when you get to see them. He takes a can, but then returns it, apparently still not sure of the shape of the space you're trying to build. "You mean it's some cliché bullshit about the journey being more important than the destination - or the fight being more important than the outcome, I guess - right? Isn't that what you said about matespritship before?"

"That's different! Matespritship is just the more violent counterpart to moirallegiance. You are fighting _with_ your matesprit, not with them." You stop and think about that for a minute. "Dave, your language is too ambiguous! What I mean is, you are together, on the same side, you might say, and not trying to oppose one another." You remember playing Sgrub, teaming up with Karkat against the monsters, fighting back-to-back or taking a boss from two sides at once; standing with him on a hill covered in grist and savoring the victory. You fought _for_ each other, that was the right word, had each other's backs and built up each other's strengths. It felt like you were a team within a team, bound together by gore and violence and singularity of purpose. Getting that Karkat back is going to take some doing, but nothing good ever comes free. "It is similar, but the feelings are different."

"Right," he says. "'Pity', versus 'hate', whatever the hell those actually _mean_. Seriously, maybe this is just cultural miscommunication or whatever, but both of those are really fucked up things to build actual relationships around, and they don't sound anything like what you've actually described in the past. I don't 'pity' you, and I don't fucking 'hate' Vantas." He shreds a discarded piece of can label. "I don't even really buy that this thing we have is whatever kind of troll romance you all seem to think it is, anyway."

"Those are just terrible translations," you say. "Don't get so hung up on the words!" Dave can call your moirallegiance whatever he wants, as long as he keeps doing it right. You place a few cans to outline your plans for the courtblock so he can follow them.

"You don't have special unpronounceable troll words for those, too? If you're going to insist on saying weird shit like 'kismesis', why not just use the troll word for the feelings, too, instead of mugging innocent English ones that were going around minding their own damn business and meaning something completely different?"

"'Kismesis' isn't Alternian, silly!" You say the real word, and he just gives you a blank look. "For some reason, Karkat decided it was necessary to construct ridiculous calques for quadrant names by mashing random human languages together. I think it was for that treatise on romance he wrote up for John."

"Dude, you're shitting me." You shake your head solemnly. To be fair, though, Karkat had clearly just been trying to distract himself from the real problems of your situation that he couldn't do anything about. "Ok, but why wasn't it as important to come up with careful translations for the terms for the actual _feelings_?"

"This _is_ Karkat we're talking about here," you remind him.

"Whatever. I don't care if they _are_ from human languages," Dave decides, moving to fill in the room you've defined. "Rose may know some of that shit, but it's all Greek to me."

"Not just Greek! It's Turkish too."

"How the heck do you guys even know these languages? Actually, you know what, I don't want to know." He surreptitiously tries to switch out a grape jelly label in your growing pile with blueberry cheesecake, and you decide to let him. "Just - Terezi, what does he want from me?"

"That is the wrong question, Dave! What do _you_ want from _him_?"

He pauses, looking away and then raking his eyes across the entire sprawl of Can Town, from the imposing city center to the rough chalk fields, finding everything to look at that isn't you. After a minute, he says: "I don't know."

This is your cue! You will talk his feelings up into the clarifying moonlight without destroying them under the harsh and uncaring sunlit scorn that makes him hide behind dark glasses, show him things he never knew, and make him glad he learned them. He will be happier, you will inch ever closer to finding out who Dave Strider really is, and it will be a fun jam full of feelings, openness, and self-discovery.

Well, in most cases it would be. But you are not blind in any of the ways that matter, and you know this is only going to bring up his black feelings for Karkat, all his desires to fight _against_ him (not _for_ him), to push him back and oppose him, beating him down and meeting the core of his resistence. This is not the Karkat you want to know! Your feelings have probably confused him enough already, and your reactions to his will only confuse him further. This is not the job for _you_. You will have to find a way to make Karkat do the legwork himself.

You get up, and his eyes snap to you like rifle sights. "Where are you going?"

"It is not important. I'm sorry Dave, but this time you will have to talk this out with him! I cannot help you with everything."

"Is that actually a thing that happens? Like, talking things out with potential hateboyfriends, or whatever?"

"Of course it is! Weren't you listening when I told you it wasn't just fighting?" Getting _Karkat_ to talk might take some meddling, but not anything too strenuous. Once he realizes that this is a thing he can have if he puts the right effort into it, he should be happy to do all the work for you. You just have to put it to him in the right way.

He looks a little lost and disappointed, and it breaks your heart just a bit. "Look Dave, everything will be fine! Trust me, it will all work out." You grin down at him. "Have I ever been wrong?"

He relaxes slightly and shakes his head, puts the last can in place on the new extension, and then reaches for his shades. "Not yet, anyway. See you around, Terezi."

You traipse off into the lab. Now is the time for meddling.


	4. Terezi: Interrogate prime suspect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the hard chapter where I sit around angsting about not writing this pairing the right way. I think the rest should go more quickly.
> 
> By the way, I love seeing your comments, guys, here or on the kinkmeme, even if I don't respond because I am an awkward loner who cannot social interaction. Also, I love whoever [left me goggles](http://paradoxcase.tumblr.com/post/23494524240/i-was-looking-at-comments-on-ao3-this-morning-and) on Entire Work view, it was really cool to see that.

**> Terezi: Interrogate prime suspect.**

Only a few minutes into looking for Karkat, and you're already starting to rethink this plan of action. Your intervention must be swift and decisive, befitting of an executor of justice such as yourself! Maybe during the game this would have been easy, but Karkat has been such a mess since then that sometimes you no longer feel like you really understand him. You are working on that, to be sure, but you are not quite ready to put your theories to the test like this. A brief instance of meddling is one thing, but you are no one's auspistice, and especially not Karkat's! This might actually be the one circumstance where a mistake would be worse than taking no action.

Why must it always be so _complicated_ with him?

You briefly consider using your Seer powers to ensure everything goes according to plan, but... the last time you tried to use them for something like this you wound up having to choose between killing Vriska and killing everyone. It's stupid - there's no way anyone could possibly die because of this silly inter-species quadrant drama; it's such a ridiculous possibility that that statement probably isn't even going to turn out to be ironically prophetic. Still, you can't help feeling a little bit sick at the idea. Dave was probably right.

 _People make mistakes because they don't know what's going to happen,_ he'd said. _That's your basic allowance for making mistakes right there - 'oops, didn't see that coming, real sorry about that' and then it's cool. When you know what's going to happen, you don't get to make mistakes anymore, you just get bad decisions. Or bad deeds, or sins, or whatever you want to call them, but I don't mean in some kind of religious fucking metaphysical sense - I mean in your head, where you've actually got to live with yourself, and sometimes there just isn't a right choice to make. It's why I never looked ahead during the game - leaving aside the fact that that's a hell of a lot more of a headache for me than it is for you - I just went back in time and told my past self exactly what he needed to know, and nothing else. And I always trusted future Dave. Future Dave was the shit, because he let me make mistakes. If you try to use your powers like a god, you'll just wind up holding yourself to godlike standards. It's probably why people aren't meant to be able to do this shit in the first place._

 _I didn't have a choice,_ you'd reminded him. _I didn't have a future Terezi, and Vriska had to be stopped somehow. I keep thinking: if only I'd used it earlier, would I have had more choices? Or just more bad decisions?_

 _What happened, happened,_ he'd said. _Don't think about what you could have done differently to fix everything. Leave that to those of us who actually get to do do-overs._ Then he'd just held you for a long time.

You shake off the memory, and try to get back to planning manipulation the old-fashioned way, but you're not really feeling it anymore. _Is_ there even a way to tell Karkat Vantas he's doing his romance wrong without having him throw a fit? He's probably working himself up into an anxiety spiral even now, and you are _so tired_ of watching him wrap himself up in his self-pity blanket like a maladjusted wiggler. You've already spent so much time getting him to come out of himself and forget his fears and perceived inadequacies, and you're not going to be the one to undo all of that progress! And besides, you are not his moirail.

His moirail. Now, _there's_ an idea.

It's hard to know exactly how _good_ a moirail Gamzee is, since no one besides Karkat has actually seen him for half a sweep now, but you're pretty sure he must be doing _something_ right. Karkat did always listen to him, even before the game (he grumbled about it, but Karkat grumbles about everything), even when the rest of you had mostly written Gamzee off as kind of a lunatic. Perhaps Mr. Grape Jelly has hidden depths! Well, it doesn't actually matter, as long as _Karkat_ thinks he does and takes his advice.

Finding Gamzee is something you actually have no qualms about using your ill-begotten Sight for, and eventually you're forced to resort to just that; you suppose if it were actually possible to locate him with your nose alone, Kanaya would have carved him into clownchops perigees ago. It becomes very clear very quickly that this is not the most effective use of your powers. Why yes, if you run around in circles for a half an hour before heading off in a different direction, you will _eventually_ encounter a hidden clown, but you were kind of hoping that this would be _faster_ than just wandering aimlessly.

The fourth time you walk past the same pillar, though, you sniff out something you hadn't noticed before - a lever hidden in a crevice away from the light, not that that matters to _you_. As soon as you pull it, possibilities collapse and the future crystalizes like frost in the chill just before the dawn. You know where you have to go. You have two and a half minutes to get there. There was a puzzle just like this on LOTAF - Karkat is not _nearly_ as clever as he thinks he is.

The secret room is mostly clean, but there are occasional outcroppings of junk - horns, bits of alien machinery, glass bottles, pie tins - cautiously encroaching on the clear areas. It's the very model of a hive shared by one very neat person and one very sloppy person; no points for guessing who is who. There's a pile in the corner - a _proper_ pile, with the sharp edges and the hard angles mixed in with the soft things. You suddenly realize that you _have_ kind of missed that texture variation since you attempted to modify your pile for Dave - you'll have to put it back at some point.

Gamzee is about to wake up from the sound you made opening the door, though, and your powers are gearing up for the conversation, so you shut them off and draw your attention to your other senses. As the pile shifts, you tense and change your grip on your cane slightly.

Back when you lived on Alternia and English was just another bizarre alien language from a far-flung corner of the galaxy, a relic of an extinct race with an incomprehensible culture, you learned Alternian words to correspond to English _safety_ and _danger_. Since then, actual English-speaking aliens have informed you that _safety_ means something completely different to them, and that your words are better rendered as _controlled danger_ and _uncontrolled danger_. Controlled danger was Vriska Serket, when she wasn't underestimating her enemies; Feferi with her trident; Nepeta on the hunt. Karkat managed it back in the game from time to time, and even Eridan could cloud a pretty nasty game of FLARP before Vriska left him behind in her wake and his life became an exercise in self-pity. Uncontrolled danger was Gamzee Makara half a sweep ago, standing on a rooftop holding a giant hammer, terrified and deadly and looking like he was about to fall to pieces in the most destructive way possible.

The law is very clear about what happens to uncontrollably dangerous trolls. If you had been the leader, there would only be three of you now, and Kanaya would probably be hunting down _you_ with her chainsaw. But Karkat is nothing if not romantically optimistic, in spite of all his bluster. You trust in his leadership abilities and his follow-through, but you've often had reason to doubt his judgement - although, you _have_ gained more respect for his decisions in recent weeks. And now you guess you have a little more, because the Gamzee that steps out of the pile toward you is, in spite of being momentarily sleep-bleary, far more controlled than the one you remember.

Interesting!

He blinks at you in surprise, and you grin. You are not afraid of him at all now - he has lost the advantage of unpredictability, and all the other advantages are yours. If Karkat has transformed him from a liability into a person, than so much the better. People are always easier to deal with.

"Gamzee, I have something for you to pass on to your nubbier half!" you tell him, not giving him a chance to recover. "If he would like Dave in his black quadrant, he is going to have to take things slower. Not only is it very bad form to start by pinning your object of disaffection to a wall, but Dave is just as clueless about this as he is."

"What's all this, now?" Gamzee asks. There's a contour to his tone that isn't the easygoing sanguine confusion you expected, and it throws you for a moment. "You up and sniffed out this place with your bitchtits magic mind powers just so you can tell me how Karkat's all got to do his blackrom what he hasn't even really _talked_ to me about yet?"

" _Someone_ has to help him not screw up his quadrants," you point out, "and it is more your job than mine! What kind of moirail would I be if I didn't take an interest in Dave's quadrant difficulties? We are duty-bound to help them out of their mistakes."

He... _grins_ at you. "And what kind of moirail would _I_ be if it were my motherfuckin _job_? Are you going to send me some _court orders_ , legislacerator? Fill my inbox with _duties_ and requirements? You going to come knocking again if I don't meet my deadline?"

You will have to reevaluate Gamzee a bit - this version has a much more interesting sense of humor, just for one thing. You need to win him over in order to get his help, but the more you talk to him, the more fun that prospect starts to look. "Of course not! We will work together to get them back on the right track. What else are we here for, after all?"

"It still seems to me that you are here to get me to do some dirty work for you, sister. It seems to me that you will have to come up with some kind of motherfuckin _incentive_." You can't help noticing that he has been uncharacteristically... focused through this conversation, and it gives you chills that make you think of Vriska and your old FLARP campaigns. "Are you offering up your treasure hoard, or threatening me with more flaming fucking veiled criticisms from your toothy maw?"

"Why not both?" You give him a better look at the toothier parts of your maw. He's not what you expected at all - he is everything you could have hoped for, all the excitement you've missed since the game ended and you've had nothing to do but wait around to die. "Or would you prefer the invective as the reward after all?" You raise your cane and level it at his throat. This is a bit over the top for black flirtation, but this _is_ Gamzee.

He startles; for a moment, he is that scared kid on the rooftop again, lost and alone and out of control - but then he is back, all anger and focus and that delicious dark humor. "Whatever it is you've got in your motherfuckin _mind_ , Seer, I will meet you there and you had better be motherfuckin _ready_." 

You cannot help but laugh in a kind of giddy triumph. Karkat may always be Karkat, but not _everything_ need be so complicated.


	5. Karkat: Have second thoughts.

**> Karkat: Have second thoughts.**

What had you even been thinking? After all that time talking to John and Jade, you'd just about concluded that humans simply weren't capable of real blackrom, even putting aside the weird gender hangups they apparently have. Rose and Dave were just so different from the other two that you thought you must have gotten entirely the wrong impression of humans the first time around, but maybe you _were_ right. Their culture doesn't even have the concept, after all.

But Dave... Dave has been blackflirting with you for so long now it is getting to be silly. You weren't sure at first, and god knows you'd had no desire to reenact that terrible first conversation with John, but it just kept happening. It was all so utterly _textbook_ , too, all of the best tropes from all of the most classic romances, and when you realized you were actually black for him it was a relief, because it made you realize that you weren't black for Terezi and never had been. He may not know anything about how proper romance works, but those tropes are tropes for a reason, right? There's no way it didn't mean anything, and that duel was fucking _perfect_ , or so close it made no matter; it could have been on the silver screen, or in one of the better class of your novels, the climactic scene of a tale of epic interspecies romance, an assertion of the essential psychic unity of all intelligent races. Sollux always claimed those stories were just propaganda for the Empire's alien thralls, but Sollux probably has more psychic unity with his fucking bees than with actual trolls, so he can just fuck off and enjoy his half-afterlife in dream-bubble hell that he went and fucking abandoned you for.

But the point is - the point is, it had been so _right_ , exactly what you'd always imagined. Where did you go wrong? What did you _do_ to make him run off like that?

You look down at your hand with the drying blood on it again - _his_ blood, but it's exactly the same color as yours. You'd stabbed yourself on a piece of alien machinery and probably injected yourself with fucking tetanus just to be sure, and you really couldn't tell the difference by sight. It's bizarrely wrong in every other way though - the texture, the consistency, the taste; it dries the same color as yours too, but it doesn't dry the same _way_. Even if it were a normal color, there's no way anyone could mistake this for anything other than a completely alien substance, and it made you realize: you might be a freak of nature with funny-colored blood, but you're still a _troll_ in all the ways that really matter. For once in your mistake of a life, you can look at someone else's blood and feel _more_ normal than usual. It's... really nice.

There's a sudden clanking above your head, and you scramble to your feet, Dave momentarily forgotten. You'd gone off to an abandoned part of the lab, a place where you were sure no one would bump into you by accident, but who the hell knows what kind of monsters or mutated carapacian genetic experiments could be crawling around in the vents on this meteor? It seems you're about to find out, though, because something unhooks the grate from the inside of the vent and drops it on the ground next to you with an impossibly loud _clang_ before crawling out of the hole.

It's... Gamzee. _Gamzee_ is the terrible mutant horror that haunts the dark underbelly of this rock. Of course he is. Why did you ever think otherwise.

You reach out to steady him as he lands slightly off-balance, and he winds up braced against you, clutching at your arms. His paint is smeared in places and dirty in others, a couple of his nails are torn, and there's an ugly new bruise on his forearm. You reach out to run your hands over some brand new nicks on his horns that won't grow over for at least another half-sweep. "What the hell do you think you're _doing_ , you idiot? How many laws of physics did you have to break to even fit in there?" You absently start combing the cobwebs out of his hair, as he rights himself and puts his arms around your shoulders. "I told you, you don't have to skulk around here like this. Just stay in the room and don't worry about the others."

"You ok, best bro?" he asks, completely ignoring your questions. He grabs your hand before it can make another pass through his bird's nest and brings it around to look at it, dried red flaking off as your fingers curl.

You swallow, and close your hand into a tight fist behind his back, pulling him into a hug you hadn't realized you needed. "Shit, let's just go back, ok? But no more goddamn vents. Oh my fucking _god_ , what even made you think that was a good idea?"

You make your way back to the secret room and the lever that controls it. There are so many empty rooms that no one ever goes into here that there's really no reason to worry about _fucking ventilation ducts_. When he wants to, Gamzee can move faster than all of you, anyway; you're far more worried about him catching his horns on something and getting stuck up in the ceiling for days on end with no one the wiser.

De-venting Gamzee at least gives you something to think about that isn't Dave, and someone to berate who isn't you. By the time you're in the pile, curled around each other with his pulse in your ear, everything is feeling a lot more under control, at least for now, in this little corner of the universe. You wonder if he does things like this for you, as part of his own bizarrely effective form of moirallegiance. No, actually, you don't wonder about that at all; you just wonder how long he's been doing it on purpose. Maybe you'd been missing it for sweeps because you were waiting for something, well, _textbook_. Maybe when you're a freak of nature it's only natural, after all, that your quadrants wind up full of aliens and unhinged clowns and don't work quite the way they should. As weird as it is that Dave and Terezi have fucking _Can Town_ instead of a pile, and Dave doesn't even seem to understand what he's doing most of the time, you can't help feeling that they've still got a more typical pale quadant than you ever will. Or maybe it's just that when you're _not_ considered a freak by everyone you've got the luxury of not overanalyzing the minutiae of your life and wondering if you're somehow to blame for everything that's not absolutely fucking perfect.

Dave is an _alien_ , and he still manages to have a more normal life than you do. God, you hate him _so much_.

You can feel your hands at Gamzee's back start to clench up again. You wait for him to notice and react, but he's distracted, thinking his own thoughts into your hair. He's more tense than usual, too. You disentangle a bit and pull back to get a look at his face. "Gamzee, why did you come looking for me earlier?"

He blinks, and shakes his head as if to clear it. "Oh yeah, almost up and forgot about that. Your little _blind_ sister had something to say to you about that red-eyed motherfucker, but for some reason she had to up and do it _third fucking hand_."

There are so many worrying things about this you almost don't know where to start. How many ducts has Gamzee been crawling around in that he knows what color Dave's eyes are? He's always got his shades on, and you yourself only saw him without them just recently. When did Terezi's secondary epithet in Gamzee's lingo become _blind_? Why is Terezi trying to talk to you about Dave? Why isn't she talking to _you_ about Dave? Ok, no, you get _that_ one - you don't want to talk to her about Dave, either, she is pretty much the last person you want to talk to about Dave right now. "What was it?"

"Something about you going too fast, on account of he's not real sure what's even going on," Gamzee says. "What _is_ even going on with you guys?"

"Fuck if I know." You hide your face in his shoulder. Of _course_ Dave doesn't know anything about how blackrom is supposed to work. Why would he? You are such an idiot. But that means... "Wait." You meet his eyes again. "That means he might be all right with this after all? He's actually interested, it's just 'too fast'?" Maybe you _did_ do something right.

"Best friend, I have no goddamn _clue_ ," says Gamzee, "I'm just playing my _dutiful_ part in this game of fucking Analog Voice Transmitter. I think you are just going to have to talk to him your _self_ , because I am _done_ being some bitch's answering machine."

"Fuck, I'm sorry." His agitation is starting to give you uncomfortable shades of the period just after everything fell apart. For a while, he would still snap at you occasionally, out of withdrawal or misery or some crisis of faith, because you were the only one there. He's been a lot more like his old self for some time now, though, and this vitriol has a lot more substance to it. You sit up and look down at him. "You ok, Gamzee?"

"Better than _ok_ , bro," he says, and he really does look it; there's a smile on his face and a light in his eyes that you haven't seen in a good long while, and it's enough to make you start smiling back like a doofy moron before you catch youself. "You go schoolfeed him in the wicked black romance, Karkat, and I will find that teal motherfucker and show her _how this game is played_."

It clicks, suddenly, in a horrifying wrench, and it turns your stomach a little to hear him talk about Terezi, as if you needed one more assurance that you're really not black for her. They... they _didn't_. They _aren't_. Oh god, you can't deal with this.

"Gamzee, don't do this to me," you say, and you grab one of his hands with both of yours. "You can't have a kismesissitude with my matesprit, this is the most terrible triangle ever. Don't you see? This is why everything is at least quadrangles, the triangles never work out, and this one is the _worst_." For the first time in your life you have actual quadrants, _actual stable quadrants_ , and you are not going to fucking lose them over some shitty love triangle.

That beautiful smile falters, and you feel like the worst _asshole_. "I love you, best friend," he says, and sits up and puts his arms around you again to emphasize the point. "I love you, but I miss every other motherfucker, too. She got her laugh on, bro, but it wasn't at _me_. She wanted to play, and it wasn't just because of my motherfuckin _name_. Been seven sweeps already, and I know I'm slow at this, but now I kind of know what it's like to be a motherfuckin _troll_."

Fuck. You... you _know_ that feeling.

You hug him back just as tightly, and blink back stupid tears. "It's all right, Gamzee. We'll... we'll work it out. It has to work out somehow, right? Shit, if we can have romance with aliens, we can make this fucking terrible triangle work too. And hey," you realize suddenly, " _they_ must have one going on too, now, with _me_ , and they seem to be working out. If even they can figure this shit out, it can't be _that_ hard, right? We just all have to sit down and talk this out together. It'll be fine. It'll be great."

Oh, who are you kidding. You are so fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got to give credit to [this kinkmeme fill](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/17313.html?thread=35889057#t35889057) for the great mental image of creepydorable Gamzee crawling around in vents and getting stuck.


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